Imagine Forever: a no-heaven reason to be good

Once upon a time, not so long ago, and not very far away, a farmer imagined having a cow that he could feed and milk forever. A cow like that, he reckoned, would enable both ...

Prospects For Existence : Morality and Genetic Engineering

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

— Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics

Thou Shalt Not Kill… Whom?

Palestine Times, December 1997 Zionism comes from the bowels of the Bible. In a display of chutzpah even more galling than the Balfour Declaration, the first Zionists invented a god who commanded them to commit ...

[Arabic] Thou Shall Not Kill…Whom?

يعتقد أغلب المسيحيين واليهود أن الكتاب المقدس ينهاهم عن قتل الناس، أما الصهاينة فهم يدركون أن وصية “لا تقتل” لا تشمل كل الناس، وإنما هي أمر إلهي للمؤمنين بألا يقتلوا بعضهم فقط. إن هذا التفسير ...

Passover: Read Thoughtfully

Long before The Holocaust, Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) urged readers to consider the Passover story’s backstory – the enslavement of Egyptians that preceded the enslavement of Jews. He used the word ‘corner’ in the ...

Thou Shalt Not Kill…Whom?

This video addresses the apparent contradiction between commandments to love our neighbors and commandments to kill our neighbors in the Bible. Lead Image Courtesy: The mass grave found at Lützen. NICKLISCH ET AL./PLOS ONE

Chastity, Fidelity and Conquest: Biblical Rules for Women and War

Original In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War (pp. 77-90). Oxford University Press, 2012. For Abeer Qassim al-Janabi because the consequences of a life need ...